Terahertz sensing is enabling technology for detection of biological and chemical hazardous agents, cancer detection, detection of mines and explosives, providing security in buildings, airports, and other public space, short-range covert communications (in THz and sub-THz windows), and applications in radioastronomy, space research, defense, VLSI fabrication, and hardware cyber security. Sub-THz detection will become the key technology for the WIFI 6G enabled by Si CMOS at 3 nm and below technology nodes. This tutorial will review the-state-of-the-art of existing THz sources, detectors, sensing systems, and applications.

Semiconducting nanostructures such as nanowires (NWs) and Nanoribbons (NRs) have attracted significant attention in recent years for various type of sensing as they offer attractive physical, chemical and optical properties. They have been developed using conventional micro/nanofabrication methods as well as using printing technologies. The latter is particularly attractive because of resource efficiency of printing methods and that they could open interesting avenues for next generation manufacturing of sustainable electronics. As a result, the nanostructure based electronic layers have been printed on different types of substrates to develop sensors, energy devices, and electronic devices and circuits in flexible form factors. This tutorial will present such recent advances related to printed nanostructures-based sensors. The tutorials will cover topics such as – semiconducting nanowire growth mechanisms, methods for printed electronics layers, fabrication of various sensors (photodetectors, touch, temperature, bio/chemical etc.) based on printed nanostructures, and application of these sensors in robotics, prosthetics and wearable systems.

It is believed that low power and ultra-low power sensors would outnumber any other IoT devices by 2030. LPWAN (Low Power, Wide Area Network) technology has stood out as a promising low cost, long-range solution that enables battery-powered or energy-harvesting sensors to provide multiple years of services. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive overview of LPWAN and compare various technologies including LoRa, Sigfox, ZigBee, BLE, LTE-M, and NB-IoT etc. Industrial battery-powered sensor applications for smart cities and field study for underground sensor deployment will be illustrated. We will also walk through the end-to-end data integration steps from sensors, radio gateway, network server to the loud data platform using real life use case examples. Important security challenges and best practices for battery-powered sensors will be elaborated. Since low power sensors are constrained by power and resources, integration with computationally intensive Machine Learning (ML) for intelligent processing and decision making becomes a unique challenge. This tutorial will discuss and review various methods for applying ML to low power sensor solutions, including traditional centralized learning, federated ML, and TinyML for edge computing. Development trend and future research opportunities for low power sensors will also be presented.

Optical Fibre Sensors represents a 2 billion dollar market, which is expected to reach $ 4 billions by the end of the decade. This tutorial will provide a review of the most important sensors, including distributed optical fibre sensors, gyroscopes, chemical sensors, electromagnetic sensors, focusing on the sensing principles and the main applications. The review will also investigate prospects for future developments and possible future research in the field.

An increase in world population along with a significant aging portion is forcing rapid rises in healthcare costs. The healthcare system is going through a transformation in which continuous monitoring of inhabitants is possible even without hospitalization. Moreover, independent lifestyle and the need forces almost one-third of population in cities to live alone which increases the possibility of unforseen incidents. The advancement of sensing technologies, embedded systems, wireless communication technologies, nano-technologies, and miniaturization makes it possible to develop smart medical systems to monitor activities of human beings continuously. Wearable sensors detect abnormal and/or unforeseen situations by monitoring physiological parameters along with other symptoms. Therefore, necessary help can be provided in times of dire need. This tutorial reviews the latest reported systems and the trends on wearable and medical devices to monitor activities of humans and issues to be addressed to tackle the challenges.

Contemporary demanding gas-monitoring needs are bringing existing gas sensor designs to their fundamental performance limits in their accuracy and stability in real-world deployments. This tutorial will focus on bridging the gap between existing and required gas detection capabilities as provided by available single-output sensors, sensor arrays, and traditional analytical instruments. We will stimulate scientific and engineering senses of attendees by (1) posing “quiz” questions on design rules of traditional analytical instruments, (2) posing questions on possibilities for new principles of gas sensing and (3) by demonstrating on how these questions are addressed in building multivariable sensors that provide new performance capabilities. We will show how individual multivariable gas sensors are designed based on multi-dimensional response principles to overcome insufficient multi-gas selectivity and stability of existing single-output sensors and sensor arrays. Such performance is attractive in scenarios when traditional analytical instruments cannot be used because of their size, power, and periodic maintenance requirements. By the end of the tutorial, attendees will have a good understanding of design rules for building stable multi-gas sensors, will see practical examples of operation of multivariable gas sensors, and will relate to how these sensors may be utilized in their envisioned applications.